dividual character, however ingenious, are drawn without any regard to the objects they pretend to describe. Any of the tirades against Mr. Southey, may be applied, with equal propriety, to Coleridge or Wordsworth, or, if the reader chooses, to the Duke of Wellington. The following are designed for full lengths; the reader will doubtless be surprised, not with the resemblance to each other, but the accuracy of the separate likenesses.

"He (Coleridge to wit) judges of men as he does of things. He would persuade you that Sir Isaac Newton was a money scrivener, Voltaire dull, Bonaparte a poor creature, and the late Mr. Howard a misanthrope; while he pays a willing homage to the Illustrious Obscure, of whom he always carries a list in his pocket. His creed is formed, not from a distrust and disavowal of the exploded errors of other systems, but from a determined rejection of their acknowledged excellencies. It is a transposition of reason and common sense. He adopts all the vulnerable points of belief as the triumphs of his fastidious philosophy, and holds a general retainer for the defence of all contradictions in terms and impossibilities in practice. He is at cross purposes with himself as well as others, and discards his own caprices if ever he suspects there is the least ground for them. Doubt succeeds to doubt, cloud rolls over cloud, one paradox is driven out by another still greater, in endless succession. He is equally averse to the prejudices of the vulgar, the paradoxes of the learned, or the habitual convictions of his own mind. He moves in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense, sophistry and common-place, and only assents to any opinion, when he knows that all the reasons are against it. A matter of fact is abhorrent to his nature; the very air of truth repels him. He is only saved from the extremes of absurdity, by combining them in his own person. Two things are indispensable to him; to set out from no premises, and to arrive at no conclusion. The consciousness of a single certainty would be an insupportable weight upon his mind. He slides out of a logical deduction by the help of metaphysics; and if the labyrinths of metaphysics did not afford him ample scope, and verge enough,' he would resort to necromancy and the Cabbala." He only tolerates the science of astronomy, for the sake of its connection with the dreams of judicial astrology, and escapes from the Principia of Newton to the jargon of Lily and Ashmole. All his notions are fleeting and unfixed, like what is feigned of the first forms of things, flying about in search of bodies to attach themselves to; but his ideas seek to avoid all contact with solid substance. Innumerable evanescent thoughts dance before him, and dazzle his sight, like insects in the evening sun. Truth is to him a ceaseless round of contradictions; he lives in the belief of a perpetual lie, and in affecting to think what he pretends to say. His mind is in a constant state of flux and reflux. He is like the sea-horse in the ocean; he is the Man in the Moon, the wandering Jew.-The reason of all this is, that Mr. Coleridge has great powers of thought and fancy, without will or sense. He is without a strong feeling of the existence of any thing out of himself; and he has neither purposes nor passions of his own to make him wish it to be. All that he does or thinks is involuntary; even his perversity and self-will are so. They are nothing but a necessity of yielding to the slightest motives. Everlasting inconsequentiality marks all that he attempts."

"He (Wordsworth) sees nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it, but his own. His egotism is, in this respect, a madness; for he scorus even the admiration of himself, thinking it presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all art. He hates chemistry; he hates conchology; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates logic; he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible, and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose; he hates all poetry but his own; he hates Shakespeare, or what he calls those interlocutions between Lucius and Caius,' because he would have all the talk to himself; and considers the movements of passion in Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, as impertinent, compared with the moods of his own mind; he thinks every thing good is contained in the Lyrical Ballads;' or

if it is not contained there, it is good for nothing; he hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens; he hates Rembrandt; he hates Raphael; he hates Titian; he hates Vandyke; he hates the antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus de Medicis; he hates all that others love and admire but himself. He is glad that Bonaparte is sent to St. Helena, and that the Louvre is dispersed, for the same reason, to get rid of the idea of any thing greater, or thought greater than himself. The Bourbons, and their processions of the Holy Ghost, give no disturbance to his vanity, and he therefore gives them none."

"Every sentiment or feeling that he (Southey) has, is nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time is infallible, but that no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools can differ with him. The friendship of the good and wise is his.' If any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself formerly did, this but aggravates the offence, by irritating the jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his understanding, its glassy essence,' that the slightest collision of sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles, moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the word laureate with an e at the end of it. If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles, prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom, candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religon, but he is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments, but he hates new ones (such as the Bible Societies and Sunday Schools, we suspect.) He has no ob jection to regicides, but he is inexorable against usurpers. He will tell you that the ⚫re-risen cause of evil' in France yielded to the Red Cross and Britain's arm of might;" and shortly after, he denounces the Red Cross as the scarlet whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in this age of light-Save or we perish;' and yet, sooner than they should be saved by Joseph Fox, or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned; he would go himself into Egypt, and pull down "the barbarous kings" of the east; and yet, his having gone there on this very errand, is not among the least of Bonaparte's crimes; he would abate the malice" of the Pope and the Inquisition; and yet he cannot contain the feelings of his satisfaction, at the fall of the only person who had both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much affection to those who are born to thrones; but that any one should gain a crown, as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey's levelling muse!"

We close this volume with feelings of unrelieved disgust. It is to us, as we hope it is to all others, matter of sincere regret, that Mr. Hazlitt should be guilty of prostituting his powers to such ignoble ends; and it is grieving to think, that there is but little hope of amendment, at least where party spirit and politi cal prejudice are likely to have any range.

ART. V. Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands, in a Series of Letters, descriptive of Manners, Scenery, and the Fine Arts. By W. H. WILLIAMS, Esq. with Engravings from Original Drawings. In two Volumes. Pp. 886. 8vo. Edinburgh, Constable & Co. 1820.

MR. WILLIAMS' reputation as an artist could not fail to secure him a flattering reception as an author. For the interest which, in this his native city, his enterprising expedition excited, we Should have held that he made a fair return, had he brought with him a well-stocked portfolio alone; and we should certainly not have felt entitled to call him to account for the state of his common-place book. He has, however, come home doubly provided; for while it is consistent with our knowledge that he has accomplished, as the memoranda of future pictures, a valuable collection of sketches of many of the most exquisite scenes in the finest countries in the world, he has, as a writer, told the tale of glory and sadness, to which those regions bear witness, with a spirit and feeling in every way worthy of the high theme. Travellers, after taking leave, experience the pretty uniform fortune of being forgotten till they reappear; but our author and his accomplished friend-of whom we may not say more than that he gave up a seat in Parliament for this expedition-were kept in view during all their wayfarings, as well as welcomed on their return, as the bearers of rich gifts to their countrymen.

It appears that, saving some contributions, chiefly statistical and mineralogical, from his friend, the duty of writing as well as drawing has devolved upon Mr. Williams. The most valuable parts of his work, and necessarily the best executed, are his account of the fine arts, ancient and modern, in the countries visited; and his description of the scenes and the scenery, the splendours and the ruins, of those "lands of extremes." In this his own department we are disposed to try him as an author; scarcely deeming it fair, to measure what he has said, and agreeably said, on morals, politics, antiquities, and living manners, by the same standard which we apply to the works of preceding travellers, whose sole objects these were, and who, in failing in them, had failed in every thing.

There are landscape painters-so called for distinction's sake merely-upon whom all that our author saw and felt would have been utterly thrown away. Those are they who do portraits of given natural scenes, and are amply rewarded if the likeness be recognised. Turners, Calcotts, Thomsons, the poets of visible

nature, are rare; the painters who give to their landscapes sentiment and language; who, while they present inanimate objects to the eye, are yet working on the associations and the feelings. To this superior class our author belongs. It is long since he shewed, that he has that within him which sees no charm in "image" without "sentiment and thought;" which holds every touch of his pencil balked of its end, that does not rouse a re'collection, or excite an emotion; which feels, that to inanimate scenery may be imparted a soul which will give it eloquence, and that to copy, however faithfully, the mere outline and colouring of external nature, without a single sentiment to give it life, is to pourtray matter without mind-to address the eye without awaking the imagination, or touching the heart. Few think of rating aright the power of landscape painting; although we have heard many say, that, without being able to tell why, they experience in viewing the pictures of Claude Lorraine a mental delight, from some source besides their golden glow and exquisite softness. Mr. Williams had made a comparatively limited progress in this field of sentiment before his travels. He was well aware of how much more it was capable; especially how much its range might be increased by the alliance of moral feeling; and in those countries which, to the richest hues and draperies of nature, superadd the marks of man, the monuments of human grandeur and decay in their extremes; where every scene is eloquent, every mountain and plain, column and tower, speak to a degenerate race of gods and heroes, he expected to find, and he has found and well selected, as several pictures, which he has already finished most satisfactorily demonstrate,-the most instructive and impressive subjects for his enchanting art.

Much absolute novelty was not to be expected for the pencil in Italy. The historical landscape painter, so we may call him, has there a fearful rival in Claude Lorraine; for who shall shed sun and moon on canvas, with a fervid glow, with a silver clearness like his! or, who may hope to share with him in the luxu riant empire of Italy's sky and atmosphere! Yet were all this nothing without the nameless charm with which some ruined aqueduct, arch, or temple, telling the tale of the glory and decline of Rome, invests his scene; or the life and splendour which some actual movement of men, some spectacle of royal or ecclesiastical magnificence, gives to his conceptions.

But in Greece-living Grecce no more"-Mr. Williams found almost an untrodden path to renown. There is a theme of more thrilling sublimity, and still deeper pathos. Every variety of mere landscape grandeur and beauty exists in the

mountains and valleys of Greece. Parnassus alone, as a natural scene, is not surpassed in the world. But Parnassus, enriched with the mouldering remains of Delphi, assumes a higher tone of sentiment. Parnassus, with its Castalian brook, and all its poetry-the region of inspiration, the mystic throne of superstition-towering above the classic plains of classic Greece-Marathon, Leuctra, Platea-and looking down on the mouldering shafts and capitals of Thebes and Corinth, and all that makes the heart proud and sad in once-glorious Athens ! No visitor of these deeply touching scenes could have been better fitted to imbibe their pathetic lessons, to inhale the spirit of the place, to sympathise in its mournful tale, and, with his pencil, tell it as it was told to him." We can vouch for his success; for we cannot, in our notice of Mr. Williams, separate the artist from the author: and in perfect confidence in the fidelity of his testimony, we experienced, on seeing his Grecian pictures, an increase of melancholy from the very gaiety of the tints in which his scenes of beautiful desolation are arrayed-a splendour which bears witness, that nature in those enchanting regions is still the same, while MAN alone has disappeared.

Our author had yet another important task before him, for which he was not less fitted; namely, to compare the progress of the fine arts in Britain with their state in that country which has long been the emporium of the plastic wealth of the world; and, as connected with that inquiry, to examine, with critical accuracy, in this age of light and enterprise, those works which, for three centuries, have been approached with superstitious awe alone. He has done both duties well and truly, skilfully and candidly; and we rejoice in the bold note of encouragement which he has sounded to his countrymen, that the highest perfections of the greatest masters are attainable, and have been well nigh attained by British artists, and by them alone. Is our joy a right feeling? Is it that we hail the progress of knowledge and skill, which, in rapid succession, are breaking the spells of prejudice, and unfettering the mind of man? or is it a secret leaven of that spirit, less creditable to human nature, which is merely pleased to find, that, after all, we are not so much surpassed as has been so long imagined? Mr. Williams's positive qualifications for such an embassy are, taste, feeling, and candour; with knowledge of the fine arts from their base to the pinnacle of their fabric; and, negatively, he is altogether free from the pedantry, conceit, irritability, and impertinence, which render most small artists, and some great ones, the most remarkably disagreeable persons known in civilized society.

We need not detain our readers at Ostend, Ghent, Brussels,

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